Brothers in Arms

The best WWII shooter ever made? (Hint: Yes!)

Like the very game itself, Brothers in Arms: The Road to Hill 30 is fighting an upstream battle from the outset. As a typical looking World War II first-person shooter full of tired genre conventions (think earth tones, wooden rifles, and Germans with biker helmets), Brothers in Arms faces overwhelming cynicism from a generation of would-be grunts weaned on the trauma of Saving Private Ryan and EA's Medal of Honor series. But what these static screenshots don't convey is the game's refreshing consistency of design, where developer Gearbox has visualized a hellacious sandbox to test your tactical mettle. You thought you were sick of WWII games? After playing Brothers in Arms, you'll be asking why there aren't more military shooters like this one. It's that good.

Much of the game's soul can probably be attributed to its creator, Randy Pitchford, who has created a chillingly accurate WWII shooter out of sheer reverence for its subject. The payoff is a richly detailed account of the 101st Airborne Paratroopers' ordeal during the Allied invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. You play as Sergeant Matt Baker, a Tom Hanks-esque Everyman who gets shoved out of his shambling troop carrier over the French countryside, only to be assigned squad leader for six of his fellow soldiers. He repeats his mantra a couple times during the opening levels of the game: "I didn't ask to be squad leader." Like the war movies that inspire it, Brothers in Arms' overriding mood is somber and introspective, with the occasional lighthearted punctuation of your teammates' crude banter.

And it works -- for the most part. While the game's script and voice work are adequate, they lack the subtlety and emotional pause on par with the rest of the Brothers in Arms experience. What you get then, is a strange contrast of goofy puppet-style acting -- complete with wandering eyes, stiff animation, and groan-inducing one-liners -- on top of a heart-swelling score as good as any composed for Spielberg, and some truly beautiful killing fields. This is only strange because Pitchford and his brain trust obviously wanted to -- no, obsessed over -- making a WWII fps with the same sort of emotional impact from dramas like Band of Brothers and The Thin Red Line, only to deliver, in terms of characterization, something with as much humanity as Halo 2 -- that is to say, not very much at all.

But like they say in real life: When the bullets start flying, you're not going to care about any of that crap. The order of the day is to kill or be killed, and nothing gets that point across better than staring down the wrong end of a German Panzer tank. It's wild, desperate situations like these that remain sizzled into your memory hours after you've turned off your Xbox or PS2. In direct contrast to just about every WWII fps you've ever played, Brothers in Arms predicates its core gameplay on chaos -- albeit, a sort of controlled anarchy that falls within its own set of rules. Instead of the ultra-linear outdoor shooting galleries you've experienced with Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms is more about presenting you with a combat scenario, pitting two opposing forces on a playing field against each other. Triumph is awarded to the team with better tactics, but how you eliminate your enemies is entirely up to you.

Other games (Rainbow Six 3 and Republic Commando come to mind) have tried fusing real-time tactics with fps controls, but Brothers in Arms is the first title to actually achieve a playable balance between depth and action. Controlling your two squads is as easy as holding down the left trigger, pointing the context sensitive cursor at a location or, if you please, a cluster of Nazis soldiers, and then letting go of the left trigger to execute an order (accompanied by war cries such as "Red! Take out that goddamn gun!"). You can even just as easily order your team to storm a suppressed enemy to force their hand. These relatively simple commands carry plenty of strategic weight in the midst of a firefight. So much so, in fact, that when you lose two or three men from a careless maneuver, it hurts both your resources and your personal morale.

Like other open-ended games, Brothers in Arms is a limitless source of harrowing war stories, as no two play sessions unfold in the same way. Much of its unpredictable nature comes from the game's excellent A.I. soldiers, who more than make up for their lack of personality during cutscenes with command performances on the battlefield. While they'll proactively shoot at visible enemies and take cover behind objects on their own, your teammates are an invaluable tactical resource if used correctly. Like Full Spectrum Warrior, your teams are divided into two teams, consisting of three men each. And just like in FSW, you command one unit to suppress the enemy while another team (usually lead by you directly) tries to outflank the opposition. Where Brothers in Arms deviates from FSW, and ultimately redefines the tactical shooter genre, is that the game allows you to not only command troops, but also puts a Thompson sub-machinegun in your hands to personally alter the outcome of the firefight. Thankfully, Brothers in Arms moves away the restrictive "paper-and-dice" rules of FSW, whereby enemies under cover are somehow magically immune to well-placed headshots and other skillful displays of marksmanship. The only operating rule here is that if you can see 'em, you can shoot 'em.

And that's pretty much it when it comes to the rules of the game. What makes Brothers in Arms such a compelling combat simulator is its ability to completely suck you into its hell, kick your heart rate into overdrive, and make you feel like you're not fighting to save the world, but fighting just to save your own ass. For starters, every weapon in this game is brilliantly modeled, down to the authentic ironsight view that forces you to actually learn how to shoot a rifle by squinting down the barrel of an M1 Carbine. After you squeeze the trigger, the simulated recoil digs into your shoulder as you readjust your aim for the next shot. After you play Brothers in Arms, weapons from any other fps feel like peashooters in retrospect.

But it's more than just a tactile sense of power. The missions themselves feature a ton of white-knuckle thrills. One chapter tasks you to take a farm so the Allies can use it as a makeshift headquarters for the campaign. Under your command are a fire team and a Sherman tank (complete with an exterior machinegun you can man). And of course, there are Nazis everywhere; behind rows of hedges, dug in snugly behind their sandbagged MG-42 machinegun nests, and within the farm itself. So as squad leader, what do you do? Sending in the Sherman alone to take out the MG-42s poses the risk of a lucky Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon taking out an invaluable piece of armor against small arms fire. The answer, of course, is teamwork -- only here, you are the team. As squad leader, you make all the snap decisions while popping off your rifle and running from cover to cover, aware all the while that a stray bullet could bring you back to that last checkpoint.

Finding fault in Brothers in Arms is relegated mostly to talking about what the game doesn't offer. It doesn't let you take control of a variety of vehicles (a la the PC military fps Operation Flashpoint). It doesn't allow for more than four players in an online game, and the online modes that it features now (a variation of CTF and other goal-based objectives) are stymied by glitches and oversights. For no good reason, server-side messages telling you, for instance, that the opposing team has dropped their (game winning) item appear smack dab in the middle of your screen, obstructing your view for the two valuable seconds you've got a guy lined up in your ironsights. And if they were going to limit multiplayer to merely four participants, why not make each of them squad leader, giving the game a total of 28 total combatants on Xbox Live (four human players, each with a squad of six men).

Then there are the graphics, which use impressive particle effects to simulate the environmental grit of war. Gearbox's attention to detail saw to it that every bullet impact has its corresponding consequence, be it the splintered debris of wood that flickers into shreds; or the plume of dust from a round that slams into brick and concrete. A mortar shell going off next to your squad is going to send dirt (and possibly some blood) flying into your face and onto the first-person camera. But what's with the strangely angular character models and bland, undetailed textures? Suppose we chalk it up to technological limitations... but could you imagine a game that's this immersive, featuring graphics on par with Halo 2 or Splinter Cell Chaos Theory?

By now, it's readily apparent that Brothers in Arms has usurped just about every WWII fps on consoles to date. This game is an instant redeemer for a genre completely saturated by those who have systematically milked every ounce of respect from military shooter fans. Fight the urge to write off Brothers in Arms simply because it's about WWII. Fight it as if you were locked in a struggle between true genre innovation and a euthanized status quo.